Quotes About Language

There seemed to be more chatter—in that curiously measured and vehement language, which sometimes reminds me of stiffening egg white and sometimes of stringed instruments but always of the underside and aftermath of passion.

You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.

You see, whites want black writers to mostly deliver something as if it were an official version of the black experience. But the vocabulary won't hold it, simply. No true account, really, of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. As it is, the only way that you can deal with it is by doing great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based.

Simplicity is king. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal. (in a 1984 interview with The Paris Review)

The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing … that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him

I doubt that Americans will ever be able to face the fact that the word 'homosexual' is not a noun. The root of this word, as Americans use it — or, as this word uses Americans — simply involves a terror of any human touch, since any human touch can change you.

Il significato letterale di «parassita», dal greco antico, è «accanto al grano».

You must learn to control the filth of your tongue, my son. It will send you to hell.

Ah, Anjin-san, that's because you're thinking in your own language. To understand Japanese you have to think Japanese. Don't forget our language is the language of the infinite. It's all so simple, Anjin-san. Just change your concept of the world. Japanese is just learning a new art, detached from the world Ã¢â'¬Â¦ It's all so simple.

It's all shit," he had muttered in English, and felt better.

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

Language liberates as it offends. Confidential taught me that.

Typography is what communication looks like. There is beauty in the language and beauty in the way it is presented.

for though the quiet of deep solitude reigned in that vast and nearly boundless forest, nature was speaking with her thousand tongues in the eloquent language of night in a wilderness. The air sighed through ten thousand trees, the water ripped, and at places even roared along the shores; and now and then was heard the creaking of a branch or a trunk, as it rubbed against some object similar to itself, under the vibrations of a nicely balanced body.

If mankind conversed only of the things they understood, half the words might be struck out of the dictionaries.

Che diritto hanno i cristiani bianchi di vantarsi del loro sapere, mentre un indiano è in grado di leggere una lingua che sarebbe troppo oscura per il più saggio di loro?

Words can't say this. The one word 'love' means too little for what it is. It means everything and that is still not enough. It doesn't communicate even the fraction of the feeling involved. Love. The word is not enough for what it is.love.Love.

Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases.

the subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses.

The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, ). The alphabet was invented only once.

What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik

The lexis is a measure of shared experience, which comes from interconnectedness. The number of users of the language forms only the first part of the equation: jumping in four centuries from 5 million English speakers to a billion.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.